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ROPE OF GOLD—Josephine Herbst—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

In 1934 critics called Josephine Herbst's The Executioner Waits one of the best novels of the year, ranked it and its predecessor, Pity Is Not Enough, just below the novels of John Dos Passes. A modern U. S. tragedy, told against a big background, these novels traced the history of the Pennsylvania-Dutch Trexler family from post-Civil War days to 1929, at once took rank as one of the best chronicles of a U. S. average family and a social era.

Rope of Gold avoids the Depression, skips to 1933-1937, a period which has ruined even more novels than the Depression. Josephine Herbst, however, comes through solvent.

An episodic novel that sprawls all over the place (Pennsylvania, Michigan, South Dakota, New York, Cuba), Rope of Gold is equally prodigal with characters. The four main ones are an intellectual farm organizer and his wife; a rising automobile manufacturer; a union organizer in the automobile factory. The characters and the events are both much like those to be found in hackneyed left-wing novels. But Author Herbst is no propagandist; there are no revolutions around the corner; her characters move under their own power; their crises occur inside themselves instead of on picket lines.